Word: grands
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Whenever he sauntered down the street there was a clamor for his autograph, a crowd of pickaninnies with hands out for pennies. Paul Whiteman brought Handy to the stage of Municipal Auditorium when he played there for the big Floral Ball. Beale Street made him the leader of its grand parade. He stood in the first automobile, doffing his hat to left & right. At small Handy Park, named in his honor, he mounted a reviewing stand, settled down in an old-fashioned rocking chair, solemnly bowed as the marchers saluted...
Last week one of the oldest and most famed furniture companies in the U. S. came completely to life again after five years of coma. In central Michigan, at the dejected heart of the old line furniture industry, the idle Grand Rapids plants of Berkey & Gay had served many a Depression-worn manufacturer as a symbol of paralysis. Last week Berkey & Gay was counting orders received at its first spring furniture show since 1931 while thousands of Grand Rapids citizens, filing through its show rooms, glowed with prospects of new jobs, new business, new publicity...
Nucleus of the company was formed in 1853 by the two brothers Berkey, Julius and William, one of whom had taken an afternoon off from logging in the Grand River to hew himself a table. Twenty years later the company was incorporated with $500,000 capital, and the great period of Grand Rapids furniture began. The Eastern market was opened to Grand Rapids when a suite (a "suit" not a "sweet," in the furniture business) by Berkey won a gold medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. After that, through the American Victorian, Eastlake, Mission and the Golden...
...unhappy hiatus in Berkey & Gay's life, the solid citizens of Grand Rapids blame the well-meaning but ill-timed effort of Zalmon G. Simmons, then head of Simmons Co. (beds), to break down the conservative tradition of Grand Rapids merchandising. This was a tradition of virtual subservience to dealers. Beginning with the first Berkey Grand Rapids furniture show in 1878, buyers from widely different localities had been allowed endless caprice. People in the U. S. had formed no assured taste in furniture, and Grand Rapids manufacturers made no attempt to form a taste for them. Berkey & Gay sold...
...Simmons Co. bought Berkey & Gay, put in a new management. At that time Berkey & Gay was doing a business of nearly $10,000,000 per year, making most of Grand Rapids' share (33%) of the fine period reproductions in the U. S. It was Bedman Simmons' belief that if the exclusive dealerships were abolished, the semi-annual furniture shows allowed to lapse and standard Berkey & Gay furniture distributed through Simmons warehouses to a mass market awakened by national advertising, the old name and the new methods would be good for an annual business of at least...